[TUHS] Did System V Really Prevent 5BSD?

[Heinz Lycklama via TUHS]

Regarding the reference to "Eunics" below - it was actually
called "Eunice" - a product introduced by the Wollongong Group
In 1981. We (ISC) also introduced a product that provided the UNIX
environment running on top of the DEC VMS system in 1979.
I took the lead on that project/product for ISC when I started with
ISC in early 1978. It turned out to be a successful product by
ISC for many years in the 1980's.

Heinz

On 12/28/2025 6:53 PM, Jon Forrest via TUHS wrote:
> Some very minor notes:
>
> On 12/28/25 5:12 PM, Clem Cole via TUHS wrote:
>
>> And getting back to BSD the key differences between 4.0 and 4.1 are 
>> pretty
>> small and the time between them was short (Oct 1980 and June 1981).  The
>> primary differences are the #ifdef FASTVAX stuff that Joy did over the
>> winter after the dust up that the Stanford folks started  in the fall 
>> 1980
>
> All the talk about Stanford should make it clear that it was actually
> the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), not Stanford University.
> SRI was also one of the first 4 nodes on the Arpanet.
>
>> - Joy had to demonstrate that Unix was just as fast as VMS (which had 
>> been
>> written in assembler). He instrumented a bunch of the kernel and if a
>> couple places dropped into assembly and got Unix to perform within a 
>> very
>> small epsilon on everything that DARPA cared about.  So the issue became
>> that ATT nor DEC was supporting Unix. CSRG does not yet exist.
>
> In the early 1980s David Kashtan at SRI wrote Eunics, which was a way to
> run Unix (I don't recall which version) on top of VMS. It was an
> emulation layer, not a virtual machine. (I'm not aware of any VMs that
> ran on top of VMS). I used an VMS executable version of 'vi' that worked
> just fine for most of my VMS career.
>
> Kashtan and Joy went back and forth for a while. I think both
> communities (VMS and Unix) benefited from their work.
>
>> [For a
>> historical prospective, Stanford had counter proposed using DEC/VMS and
>> Australian Wollongong’s Unix for VMS and the Tek/CMU IP/TCP stack for 
>> VMS -
>> two commercial products and the later FOSS. 
>
> I don't recall how Kashtan's Eunice, done at SRI, became part of the
> Wollongong Group. I do know that Kashtan and Ken Adelman wrote a
> IP/TCP for VMS called Multinet that was quite popular for a while.
> I'm not aware of it ever becoming FOSS.
>
> (For a fascinating non-Unix anecdote, check out
> https://www.californiacoastline.org/streisand/lawsuit.html about how
> Adelman presumably used some of the money he made when he and Kashtan
> sold Multinet to Cisco to fund his successful lawsuit defense against
> Barbra Streisand.)
>
> Sorry to mention VMS so much. However, early Unix history was often
> buffeted by what was happening in VMS and DEC.
>
> Jon
>